Slightly different take on gendered bathrooms:
Urinary Segregation
"When I was 25 years old I was in New York’s Guggenheim Museum. As I started walking into the women’s bathroom, a security officer put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Hold on there a minute, you (expletive) pervert, you can’t go in there' ...I literally had to go to the security office to convince him not to throw me out of the museum.All my life, I've used the bathrooms of both genders with impunity (hey, it's more efficient) and that, combined with being both biologically and personally female, has resulted in me never even thinking about the choices people have to make when they choose bathrooms, or the reactions they receive.
This sort of gender policing is extreme, but at a daily level, many people find going to the bathroom a similar ordeal....public bathrooms, a product of modern technologies and anxieties, are no longer built to withstand our postmodern blurring of binaries.
We should remember that urinary segregation is not just a site of oppression, but a site of privilege and people with privilege will fight to keep it. If we look at urinary segregation as symbolic violence, we can see that it will take a lot more than legal arguments to take it away. By insisting that all bodies must divide into “Men” or “Women,” “Gentlemen” or “Ladies,” or even “Dudes” and Dudettes,” public toilets are able to erase the messiness of bodies and gender.
Whenever I bring up urinary segregation in my gender class, white women will say “rape.” When I point out that their bathrooms at home are not segregated by gender and that sexual violence is far more likely to be committed by people we know, they resort to “but men are gross.”"
The section about the female reaction to mixed gender bathrooms, however, was fascinating. Relating back to my earlier bathroom-related post (why can I even claim authorship of two), there is a view expressed (mostly by heterosexual women, as far as I can tell) that male is equivalent to violence, and violence equivalent to rape, and when males are in bathrooms they get violent and rape is the outcome. In no way do I want to discount the very real danger of rape in public restrooms, it's a risk and one everyone should be mindful of, but there is also the danger of associating all men with danger all the time.
The coffee shop down the street from my high school wins points, not only for being awesome, but for their gender neutral bathrooms. I couldn't find a picture online, but but their bathroom signs feature Ken and Barbie dolls with a twist: Kenneth is wearing an extravagantly lacy red tank top, offset by his fabulous turquoise man-purse and floral jeans. Barb has a black tux and hot pink sneakers. Anyone can go into any bathroom. I don't know how either of my bathroom-writers would react to these signs (I'm sure you could have another year long discussion about how the exaggerated differences are non-representative of the behavior of actual gender-neutral people), but I personally love them.
I'll leave you with the lovely Andrea Gibson and her piece, Swing Set:
"Then of course there’s always the somehow not-quite-bright enough fluorescent light of the public restroom, “Sir! Sir, do you realize this is the ladies’ room?” “Yes, ma’am, I do, it’s just that I didn’t feel comfortable sticking this tampon up my penis in the men’s room.”"
